One of cinema’s truly essential elements is the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Thanks to that little idea, a film can step outside the boundaries of realism and simply chalk the implausibility up to creative license and the nature of the medium.
Sometimes, though, a movie just pushes reality too far.
That’s the problem that ultimately brings down director Kevin Macdonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) latest effort, State of Play. Adapted from an acclaimed six-part BBC mini-series, the political thriller smartly crafts its compelling conspiracy drama while weaving in tension with ease.
But any comprehension of American journalistic integrity is lost in the translation from the British source material to its Capitol Hill reinvention. For a film that revolves around an investigative reporter’s exploration of a major political scandal, to paint a laughably inaccurate portrait of the nation’s media scene – as State of Play does – is an inexcusable case of truly lazy writing.
A reporter for the fictional Washington Globe newspaper, Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe, Body of Lies) is a self-glorified figure who seems to naively believe in the enduring importance of his dying industry. With scraggly, unkempt hair, poor personal hygiene and a decidedly unorganized cubicle, McAffrey is the epitome of a stereotypical print journalist.
McAffrey meets his foil in Della Frye (Rachel McAdams, The Lucky Ones), a young political blogger at the Globe. While McAffrey continues to depend on old-school methods while typing his stories on a 16-year-old computer, it is Frye’s continual success writing thinly sourced online material that draws the veteran journalist’s ire.
Fate, of course, pairs the odd couple together when the facts of a homicide case investigated by McAffrey and a political scandal explored by Frye become unexpectedly tangled. At the center of the controversy is Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck, He’s Just Not That Into You), who just so happens to be McAffrey’s old college roommate.
The excellent leading cast is supplemented by an impressive crew of supporting players, including Robin Wright Penn (What Just Happened), Jeff Daniels (Traitor) and a delightfully feisty Helen Mirren (National Treasure: Book of Secrets). Only Jason Bateman (Hancock) seems miscast, as his usually amusing shtick feels woefully out of place.
Sadly, their efforts go to waste. Every time you find yourself getting into the film’s storyline, a scene reminds you how far-fetched the entire scenario really is. Any story penned by a journalist exposing a major corporate conspiracy directly linked to his college roommate would not only fail to achieve the far-reaching effects State of Play implies it would, but the article would receive absolutely no credibility.
This is not to overanalyze the film’s outlandish plot; rather, it is to critique the movie’s writing staff for making absolutely no effort to adapt a series from Britain (where journalistic code is acceptably less stringent) into something that would be even remotely feasible on American soil.
When considering that a pair of highly respected screenwriters such as Tony Gilroy (Duplicity, Michael Clayton and the Bourne trilogy) and Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon and The Queen) both spent time working on the script (though only Gilroy is credited), the film’s pitfalls become all the more confusing.
In multiple scenes, McAffrey and Collins clash heads over whether the journalist is acting as a reporter or a friend. But this tension would never actually happen for exactly the reason why the two fight: No paper would depend on a journalist to approach such a situation free of bias. Instead, the scoop would simply be reassigned to another writer.
Therefore, the climax State of Play is building toward is destroyed by this unfathomably egregious plot hole. How the film managed to enter production without drastic rewrites to the script is a question everyone involved in the movie should be asking themselves.
tfloyd1@umd.edu
RATING: 1.5 out of 5 stars
